sh_ and ch_ compose the same words

[MarcoP]

My conclusion is that even though ch and sh have broadly similar ratios in A and B...

• ch A = ch B x 2.82
  
• sh A = sh B x 2.18
  

...the ways that ch and sh touch following tokens seem to have widely different distributions in A and B, and I think this is almost entirely incompatible with the suggestion that ch and sh are essentially expressing the same thing.

Hi Nick,
I am not sure I can follow your argument. But I agree that statistics for the character following the two benches are interesting. Here I collected percentages for bench+char patterns in A and B. K and T correspond to ckh and cth. For instance, the first four bars represent
% of A ch- words following the che- pattern
% of A sh- words following the she- pattern
% of B ch- words following the che- pattern
% of B sh- words following the she- pattern

   

ch- and sh- appear to behave rather consistently, with ch- having high values for A or B when sh- also has high values for the same "language". But the deviations between the first four bars appear to be large enough to be relevant: in both A and B, she- tends to be relatively more frequent than che-. The next four bars for bench+o are almost perfectly aligned between ch- and sh-, and all the other sequences are considerably rarer. I don't think this is what you meant, since this can be observed on the whole text and does not depend on A vs B. Anyway, it seems to be a significant difference in the behaviour of ch- vs sh-. It is likely that the relative preference for she- vs che- has already been mentioned in this thread, but following everything is becoming difficult.

The phenomenon can also be seen in the top histogram You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.: she- words tend to have higher frequencies than the corresponding che- words. Also in word-types plots at the bottom of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.: Xhe- words tend to be above (higher she- counts) other word-types.